Lynne Segal | The Guardianhttp://www.theguardian.com/profile/lynnesegal
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Jonathan Lethem and Lynne Segal: radical writing – books podcasthttp://www.theguardian.com/books/audio/2014/feb/21/jonathan-lethem-lynne-segal-radical-left-books-podcast
The history of the American left gets a personal treatment in Jonathan Lethem's latest novel, Dissident Gardens, while the feminist and radical Lynne Segal examines the confusions and contradictions of contemporary attitudes to ageing <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/audio/2014/feb/21/jonathan-lethem-lynne-segal-radical-left-books-podcast">Continue reading...</a>Jonathan LethemFictionSocietyBooksCultureUK newsUS newsWorld newsFri, 21 Feb 2014 11:01:00 GMThttp://www.theguardian.com/books/audio/2014/feb/21/jonathan-lethem-lynne-segal-radical-left-books-podcastAlberto Pizzoli/AFP/Getty ImagesA protester with a poster reading 'Game over' during an anti-capitalist demonstration in Rome during October 2011. Photograph: Alberto Pizzoli/AFP/Getty ImagesPresented by Richard Lea and produced by Tim Maby2014-02-21T11:01:00ZWomen on screen aren't allowed to grow old erotically | Lynne Segalhttp://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/16/women-not-allowed-grow-old-erotically
If older women are given TV and film roles at all, their bodies are still subject to one of the last sex taboos<p>Diane Keaton recalled her mother's advice – &quot;don't grow old&quot; – as useless, however pertinent for Keaton's chosen career as an actress. It's a truism that interesting roles for older actresses are hard to come by. While signs of physical ageing are routinely played down in leading male actors, who regularly take roles as still vigorous and desirable characters (whether heroes or villains), the opposite applies to older actresses, if they are allowed to appear on screen at all.</p><p>Are things changing? It was <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/film/diane-keaton" title="">Keaton</a> herself who seemed to herald a shift when she played in the popular 2003 film about love in later life, Something's Gotta Give. At the time she expressed astonishment at being offered the role of romantic heroine, at 58, despite being partnered by Jack Nicholson, already a decade older. Yet, in Hollywood, the films that portray older women as desirable remain sparse, with Meryl Streep one of the precious few still allowed to play a romantic lead. Meanwhile, when not excluded, one of the notable ways that older actresses make it on to the screen is playing a character with dementia: Judi Dench in Iris (2001), Julie Christie in Away From Her (2006), Streep in The Iron Lady (2011), Emmanuelle Riva in Amour (2012).</p> <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/16/women-not-allowed-grow-old-erotically">Continue reading...</a>WomenOlder peopleFeminismGenderFilmTelevisionCultureLife and styleMediaUK newsMon, 16 Dec 2013 07:00:42 GMThttp://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/16/women-not-allowed-grow-old-eroticallyBob MarshakDiane Keaton's role in Something's Gotta Give with Jack Nicholson seemed to mark a shift in Hollywood's casting of older women.
Photograph: Bob MarshakBob MarshakDiane Keaton's role in Something's Gotta Give with Jack Nicholson seemed to mark a shift in Hollywood's casting of older women.
Photograph: Bob MarshakLynne Segal2013-12-16T07:00:42ZA groovy kind of love: from sex in the 60s, to sex in your 60shttp://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/nov/02/sex-in-60s-free-love-lynne-segal
What happened when the generation of free love grew up? A socialist feminist looks back on a life of protest and passion<p>I grew up in one of those secretly unhappy post-war Australian families. (There were many.) My mother's bitter resentment of women's lot, and the humiliations women put up with in those deceptively stable 1950s families, were expressed in the background noise, or the menacing silence, of depression and discontent. There were few hugs in my first home. In the end she was almost constantly absent, leaving us in favour of her busy gynaecological practice. Our large suburban house doubled as my father's surgery, and his assumption that he was entitled to have sex with&nbsp;some of his patients was probably not uncommon at the time. It was my mother who told me that on one occasion a&nbsp;patient spray-painted PAY BY INTERCOURSE high on the wall of our home. (When she asked what happened to&nbsp;the woman, he told her he'd had her certified, &quot;of course&quot;.)</p><p>When I left school at 17, I fled the lies and hypocrisies of my childhood as fast as I could, in search of something quite different, yet without any sense of what this might be. Entering Sydney University that same year, I quickly bonded with the small group of anarchists I met there, known as the Sydney Libertarians and linked with an older, flagrantly dissident group, the Push. It was&nbsp;the early 1960s, a time when the wider world still disapproved of women having sex before marriage – and Australia was one of the most sexually censorious countries in&nbsp;the developed world. But the anti-utopian, pessimistic anarchists I stumbled across were firm&nbsp;believers in free love. For several years around my&nbsp;early 20s, I was never alone if I didn't want to be. I&nbsp;had a series of relationships, which usually ended when the men moved on to study abroad, or one of us changed direction. I&nbsp;had experienced sexual pressure in more respectable settings when I was younger (at&nbsp;parties while still at school), but I never felt&nbsp;sexually coerced or exploited. Even now I&nbsp;sympathise with my younger, needier self, always able to find intimacy if a solitary evening loomed.</p> <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/nov/02/sex-in-60s-free-love-lynne-segal">Continue reading...</a>SexRelationshipsLife and styleFeminismWomenSat, 02 Nov 2013 09:00:00 GMThttp://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/nov/02/sex-in-60s-free-love-lynne-segallynne segalSegal with current partner Agnes: 'She has enabled me to experience more sexual pleasure than I have known before, and to see myself as desirable in different ways.'Jean Goldsmith/Jean GoldsmithLynne Segal: 'When you feel desired, at any age, you are back in touch with the younger selves you have been across a lifetime.' Photograph: Jean GoldsmithJean Goldsmith/Jean GoldsmithLynne Segal: 'When you feel desired, at any age, you are back in touch with the younger selves you have been across a lifetime.' Photograph: Jean GoldsmithLynne Segal2013-11-02T09:00:00ZLoretta Loach obituaryhttp://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2011/dec/06/loretta-loach
Television documentary-maker, journalist and historian who focused on children and crime<p>Loretta Loach, who has died of cancer aged 54, was a journalist, activist and television documentary-maker. She went on to write the pioneering study The Devil's Children: A History of Childhood and Murder, which was nominated for the Mind 2010 book of the year award. Looking at the history and treatment of children who kill, the book concluded that they are neither extraordinarily rare, nor extraordinarily evil.</p><p>Born into a Birmingham family of Irish origin and Labour activism, <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/loretta-loach" title="">Loretta </a>studied history at Sussex University, graduating in 1979. Her socialist feminist politics led her into journalism, first the newsroom of Labour's newspaper, Tribune, then on to the editorial board of the feminist magazine Spare Rib. She worked at Spare Rib during turbulent times, between 1983 and 1986, when identity politics generated angry confrontations over the difficulties of integrating the distinct oppression of particular groups of women into any common feminist framework. She ensured that the magazine covered the 1984 miners' strike, especially the role of women in the industrial action.</p> <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2011/dec/06/loretta-loach">Continue reading...</a>DocumentaryMediaTelevisionFeminismMagazinesThe miners' strike 1984-85LabourClare ShortBooksNew StatesmanChannel 4Press freedomJames Bulger murderTue, 06 Dec 2011 17:55:18 GMThttp://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2011/dec/06/loretta-loach.Loretta Loach wrote the pioneering book The Devil's Children: A History of Childhood and Murder..Loretta Loach wrote the pioneering The Devil's Children: A History of Childhood and Murder. Photograph: .Mandy Merck and Lynne Segal2011-12-06T17:55:18ZMiddlesex's philosophical struggle | Lynne Segalhttp://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/may/09/middlesex-philosophy-university
The closure of the university's philosophy department raises worrying questions about the future of humanities<p>It's all over now, but readers up early enough on election day, 6 May, could have heard the philosopher Angela Hobbs on the BBC's Today Programme expounding her role as the UK's first senior fellow in the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angie_Hobbs" title="Wikipedia: Angela Hobbs">public understanding of philosophy</a>. Recent events at <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/apr/29/philosophy-minorities-middleqsex-university-logic" title="Cif: A blow to philosophy, and minorities">Middlesex University</a> make one wonder if it's time for the creation of a fellowship in university managers' understanding of philosophy, or even in universities' understanding of themselves.</p><p>The situation is extraordinary by any rational, let alone scholarly, accounting. The Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy was the feather in the cap of that young university. It was its highest-rated submission in the last research assessment exercise and in the top third of philosophy departments in the whole of the UK. However, university finances are an arcane affair, which is probably why administrators think they can get away with anything. At Middlesex they now outnumber academic staff 890 to 733. Furthermore, the <a href="http://www.mdx.ac.uk/aboutus/Strategy/financial/index.aspx" title="Middlesex University: Financial Statements">annual increase in costs</a> on outside &quot;consultants and professional advisers&quot; between 2008 and 2009 (&pound;800,000) is well over twice the salary budget of the entire philosophy group – whose programmes are being closed for &quot;financial reasons&quot;.</p> <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/may/09/middlesex-philosophy-university">Continue reading...</a>PhilosophyUniversity fundingHigher educationPhilosophyMiddlesex UniversityEducationSun, 09 May 2010 11:00:01 GMThttp://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/may/09/middlesex-philosophy-universityFrederika Whitehead/GuardianStudents occupying Middlesex University in protest of the closure of the philosophy department. Photograph: Frederika Whitehead for the GuardianLynne Segal2010-05-09T11:00:01ZLet's end the siege, and talkhttp://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2008/feb/05/letsendthesiegeandtalk
There is no way out of this nightmare until negotiations begin between all sides in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict<p><a href="http://www.ijv.org.uk/">Independent Jewish Voices</a> (IJV) celebrates its first year with its eyes on Gaza, demanding an end to the Israeli blockade and, on the uneven playing field of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, an end to human rights abuses on both sides.</p><p>IJV was <a href="http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/independent_jewish_voices/2007/02/hold_jewish_voices_statement.html">formed a year ago</a> to raise issues of human rights generally, but especially in that part of the world where we feel our voices might have most resonance, urging a fair and peaceful end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Happily, despite inevitable opposition, we quickly gained significant support and media coverage for our stance, especially in Jewish publications around the world.</p> <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2008/feb/05/letsendthesiegeandtalk">Continue reading...</a>IsraelPalestinian territoriesMiddle East and North AfricaTue, 05 Feb 2008 08:00:00 GMThttp://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2008/feb/05/letsendthesiegeandtalkGuardian Staff2008-02-05T08:00:00ZMother couragehttp://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2008/jan/11/mothercourage
<strong>Simone et moi:</strong> She truly lived the ideal, and the pain, of an politically autonomous woman, becoming the role model of a generation in the 1960s<p>Outside university French departments, no one in Sydney (where I grew up) read Simone de Beauvoir before the 1960s, when <a href="http://www.iep.utm.edu/b/beauvoir.htm#SH3a">The Second Sex</a> was reissued as an abridged paperback. Ironically, I encountered the book in the bedroom of a lover during a brief relationship in my first year at university during that remarkable decade. It lay there because of its sexy cover (the back of a naked woman, turned to expose her breasts) and because of its accounts of lesbian sexuality, which he had underlined and read out to me.</p><p>Soon however, as I describe in my memoir <a href="http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/biography/0,,2082992,00.html">Making Trouble</a>, it was women who were most eagerly discussing the book. Men were often beating a hasty retreat from those women in awe of De Beauvoir's symbolic presence as an iconic &quot;liberated&quot; woman, the one who had chosen to remain single and sexually active in pursuit of an independent life: &quot;Simone de Beauvoir was a cold draft against his frail invalid masculinity ... [her] books seemed to move like gas through and out of the minds of women dissatisfied with men&quot;, the budding Australian author <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Moorhouse">Frank Moorehouse</a> lamented, at the close of the decade.</p> <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2008/jan/11/mothercourage">Continue reading...</a>GenderFri, 11 Jan 2008 08:30:00 GMThttp://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2008/jan/11/mothercourageGuardian Staff2008-01-11T08:30:00ZPreserving radicalism and dissenthttp://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2007/feb/09/holdjewishvoices1
Failure to settle the Israeli-Palestinian conflict strengthens the warlords and military hawks all around the world.<p>&quot;I live between hope and despair,&quot; my Israeli friends often say. But for years now despair has tended to eclipse any hope. These peace activists are never silent, although their words are routinely ignored.</p><p>&quot;Most people don't want to hear about my shame,&quot; Rela Mazali writes. &quot;As I witness, and fail to stop, the catastrophe that Israel has been bringing about in the Gaza Strip ... I can see them recoil as I name it, as if it is my act of exposure that is shameful, rather than the actions causing my shame.&quot;</p> <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2007/feb/09/holdjewishvoices1">Continue reading...</a>IsraelMiddle East and North AfricaPalestinian territoriesFri, 09 Feb 2007 10:30:00 GMThttp://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2007/feb/09/holdjewishvoices1Guardian Staff2007-02-09T10:30:00ZA misguided manifestohttp://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2006/jun/28/anewsexualmanifestonothan
Sex is a crucible of contradictions - just like Ariel Levy's naive attack on 'raunch culture'.<p>A few of my friends made it to the Guardian <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/eventsandoffers/story/0,,1801891,00.html">debate</a> on so-called raunch culture, where I joined others to discuss Ariel Levy's new <a href="http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/politicsphilosophyandsociety/story/0,,1802589,00.html">book</a>, Female Chauvinist Pigs.</p><p>Like those snapping up her book, Levy is angry that pornographic images now encroach routinely into mainstream culture. Worse, young women are embracing the most blatant forms of sexual exhibitionism, dressing up in all the trappings of porn stars and hookers, flashing thongs, frilly knickers and implant-enhanced breasts. She called for a new sexual manifesto that encourages women to question this new, retro sexism, in which women themselves are busy frantically baring their flesh in search of male approval.</p> <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2006/jun/28/anewsexualmanifestonothan">Continue reading...</a>NewspapersNational newspapersGenderThe GuardianEqualityWed, 28 Jun 2006 14:57:15 GMThttp://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2006/jun/28/anewsexualmanifestonothanGuardian Staff2006-06-28T14:57:15ZUnholy allianceshttp://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2006/apr/06/unholyalliances
Why the focus on the left? What about the right's support for a reactionary form of Islam?<p>I seem to have spent a lifetime criticising the left from within, defending it to the wider world. Given the fragility of this once flourishingly hybrid entity, this means nowadays that there are few platforms on which I can comfortably criticize it, outside the narrow domain of the SWP. I was far from comfortable when, along with <a href="http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/brian_klug/2006/04/unholy_alliance_the_left_and_r.html">Brian Klug</a>, Nick Cohen and Anthony Julius, I agreed to discuss whether 'the Left' is now in 'unholy' alliance with anti-Zionist, anti-western, reactionary forms of radical Islam, in a debate chaired by Jonathan Freedland for the Jewish Cultural Centre.</p><p>Of course, I pointed out that the left had never been a united body. In its heyday 30 years ago, it was most creative when most inclusive, attending to the multitude of voices working collectively, usually independently, inside its umbrella. But, after Thatcher's defeat of so many vehicles of the left and after the enthronement of a uniquely market-fixated, US-government sponsoring, New Labour, that multifaceted left was harder to find.</p> <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2006/apr/06/unholyalliances">Continue reading...</a>IslamPoliticsReligionBooksMiddle East and North AfricaThu, 06 Apr 2006 11:36:49 GMThttp://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2006/apr/06/unholyalliancesGuardian Staff2006-04-06T11:36:49ZLynne Segal: The brain drainhttp://www.theguardian.com/politics/2002/may/17/highereducation.publicservices
The government is making top universities more elitist than ever by forcing them to recruit more widely<p>Margaret Hodge, the higher education minister, recently set out the government's agenda for the next 10 years. All universities, she insisted, had to improve working-class access. </p><p>So, in the name of anti-elitism in education, the well-funded older universities of Britain (Oxford, Cambridge and the like), are scolded for being part of an elite. But they will be applauded if they discriminate in favour of a few more of the minority of the very best students from state schools. Encouraged to draw upon the supplement which is paid to universities for recruiting students from &quot;non-traditional&quot; backgrounds, they have set about expanding their government-friendly personnel - more &quot;widening participation officers&quot;, more bureaucrats, more auditing. </p> <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2002/may/17/highereducation.publicservices">Continue reading...</a>PoliticsHigher educationEducationUK newsFri, 17 May 2002 09:18:03 GMThttp://www.theguardian.com/politics/2002/may/17/highereducation.publicservicesLynne Segal2002-05-17T09:18:03ZGet realhttp://www.theguardian.com/education/2001/nov/27/highereducation.comment
This virtual debate on September 11 needs to go beyond the walls of academia, says <strong>Lynne Segal</strong><p>The ghost of 60s student militancy demanding &quot;free speech&quot; at the Berkeley campus of the University of California rose again recently against Berkeley's town councillors, who had called for a speedy end to the bombing of Afghanistan. Today, anti-war intellectuals in America find themselves refighting old battles. They write of new fears - not just further terrorist attacks, but FBI surveillance, creeping media censorship and death threats to anti-war colleagues. </p><p>Here, in contrast, all is strangely quiet in higher education. Student life continues largely unaffected by daily images of destruction far away and fears of terrorist attack closer to home. Political instincts are not dead, but are surfacing suitably disciplined, mimicking the sleeker, more streamlined academy. There is intellectual debate over recent cataclysmic events, but instead of the mass &quot;teach-ins&quot; of old, it tends to stay within its disciplinary domain. Even on the internet, for those with the time and resources to explore it, academic reflections come in disciplinary dialect and costume. </p> <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/education/2001/nov/27/highereducation.comment">Continue reading...</a>Higher educationEducationTue, 27 Nov 2001 03:19:18 GMThttp://www.theguardian.com/education/2001/nov/27/highereducation.commentLynne Segal2001-11-27T03:19:18ZOpinionhttp://www.theguardian.com/education/2001/sep/25/highereducation.medicalscience
We need to revitalise academic debate about the social origins of mental illness<p>The academic conflict about how to treat escalating levels of mental illness has lost none of its intellectual force since the 60s, but has only recently resurfaced. Then, as now, the role of drugs is crucial. When a British professor is denied an important job because of his views on Prozac, it is clear the debate deserves more public forums. </p><p>This summer in Berlin, the fifth Russell Tribunal provided a forum, addressing human rights in psychiatry. The tribunal was formed to challenge the legitimacy of the US war in Vietnam. This time, its two best-known participants, Thomas Szasz and Kate Millett, were both from the US, but they ended up at loggerheads over the existence of mental illness, and what to do about it. </p> <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/education/2001/sep/25/highereducation.medicalscience">Continue reading...</a>Higher educationEducationTue, 25 Sep 2001 01:57:00 GMThttp://www.theguardian.com/education/2001/sep/25/highereducation.medicalscienceLynne Segal2001-09-25T01:57:00ZReview: Inventing Herself by Elaine Showalterhttp://www.theguardian.com/books/2001/jun/23/society
Diana, feminist icon: Lynne Segal on a perky search for role models in Inventing Herself: Claiming a Feminist Intellectual Heritage by Elaine Showalter<p><strong> Inventing Herself: Claiming a Feminist Intellectual Heritage</strong> <br /> Elaine Showalter <br />384pp, Picador, &pound; 15.99 <br /> </p><p> Despite her love of all things &quot;English&quot;, Elaine Showalter dreams like an American. For her, dreams can come true - just about. There is always copious, lively scholarship in Showalter's publications, and in her latest book she returns to where things all began for her, just over 30 years ago, when she was completing a dissertation on Victorian women writers and introducing her course, &quot;The Educated Woman in Literature&quot;, at Rutgers University. Her goal was to reclaim role models for feminism. Here she again celebrates those heroines who have always puzzled, enthralled and inspired her, from the 18th century to the present. Those women who struggled most passionately to take control of their own lives and live them to the full sometimes, she suggests, succeeded in finding the love, fame and fulfilment they desired. </p> <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2001/jun/23/society">Continue reading...</a>BooksCultureSocietySat, 23 Jun 2001 00:45:02 GMThttp://www.theguardian.com/books/2001/jun/23/societyLynne Segal2001-06-23T00:45:02ZUncertain futurehttp://www.theguardian.com/education/2001/jun/12/highereducation.comment
Now the election is over, worse could be in store for the higher sector and research, says Lynne Segal<p>On the hoof, pursuing her hectic research and travel schedules, the American anthropologist Margaret Mead managed to publish more than 1,300 different pieces of writing. Perhaps our new government should adopt her as its mascot, signifying the Stakhanovism it likes to encourage and to suggest it knows a thing or two about intellectual work. </p><p>&quot;Can we count on your support?&quot; one professor of English at Sussex was asked, when phoned direct from Millbank only days before the election. &quot;Well, I'm a university teacher,&quot; he replied. &quot;What's your policy on universities?&quot; &quot;Just a minute, sir,&quot; the whirring of keyboards pulsed southwards. &quot;I can't find anything, we don't seem to have a policy here,&quot; eventually comes back. </p> <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/education/2001/jun/12/highereducation.comment">Continue reading...</a>Higher educationEducationTue, 12 Jun 2001 02:03:35 GMThttp://www.theguardian.com/education/2001/jun/12/highereducation.commentLynne Segal2001-06-12T02:03:35ZOpinion: Age and innocencehttp://www.theguardian.com/education/2001/may/08/highereducation.uk1
Academics nearing retirement are just as vulnerable to prejudice as other older people<p>&quot;Never in human history has a population so wilfully defied nature as has the present generation.&quot; With this bold statement, gerontologist Tom Kirkwood kickstarted this year's Reith lectures. The series has generated far less controversy than usual. Ageing remains the depressing turn-off, the great taboo, the feared and yet, inevitably, necessary political topic we cannot completely ignore. </p><p>So let me try to turn your thoughts to ageing and its vicissitudes in the contemporary academy. I'm not sure which generation Kirkwood has in mind, but for a while my own one, graduating into careers at the end of the Sixties, had a mellow ride in the academy. </p> <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/education/2001/may/08/highereducation.uk1">Continue reading...</a>Higher educationEducationUK newsTue, 08 May 2001 01:36:51 GMThttp://www.theguardian.com/education/2001/may/08/highereducation.uk1Lynne Segal2001-05-08T01:36:51ZOpinion: Lynne Segalhttp://www.theguardian.com/education/2001/apr/10/highereducation.uk1
After a decade of market imitation, is it possible to be a radical intellectual?<p>Have you had yours yet? One astonished academic after another has sent me copies of letters asking them to consider a little school teaching on the side. It is unclear if the private company soliciting us imagines, correctly, that the wages of many academics are so meagre that extra work is needed to feed mortgages and families or that they assume, incorrectly, that we have time on our hands. </p><p>These are strange times, as Stan Cohen noted recently, for those who ever took seriously the &quot;role of the intellectual&quot;. Yet this was a gripping topic in the immediate wake of sixties radicalism. A cohort of students and academics pondered the place of intellectuals in contesting discrimination and inequality. In his own latest book, States of Denial, Cohen remains resolutely rooted in the legacy of this past, paradigmatic in the diffusion of radical sociology in the 1970s. </p> <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/education/2001/apr/10/highereducation.uk1">Continue reading...</a>Higher educationEducationUK newsTue, 10 Apr 2001 17:00:37 GMThttp://www.theguardian.com/education/2001/apr/10/highereducation.uk1Lynne Segal2001-04-10T17:00:37ZJane Fonda's gender studies centrehttp://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/mar/07/gender.familyandrelationships
Jane Fonda's gender studies centre may have worthy goals, says <B>Lynne Segal</B> - but will it tell us anything we don't already know?<p>Gilligan was an overnight celebrity feminist nearly 20 years ago. Voted Woman of the Year by Ms magazine in 1984, and gracing the cover of Newsweek, she used her psychological expertise to argue that women's moral development is distinct from that of men - different, and more desirable. Pace Thatcher, Widdecombe and Baroness Jay, women are more compassionate in their moral reasoning, less confident, dogmatic and prone to abstractions or the espousal of universal causes than men. </p><p>Since then, Gilligan has mined a seam that has uncovered the damage inflicted on adolescent girls in the US. Her work has de scribed how girls' confidence is undermined as they conform to gender scripts that silence the wisdom once acquired from earlier maternal attachments. Fonda was drawing directly on Gilligan's research when she told her Harvard audience that girls, &quot;bright-eyed and bushy-tailed&quot; at nine, are self-censoring and vague at 13 - despite increasing academic success. So is it, as Gilligan suggests (in tension with her own account of women's recoil from abstract thought), social pressure that undermines the wisdom that girls acquire at their mother's knee? This leaves Fonda a little muddled: &quot;It's in my DNA. The ways girls internalise and express the difficulty of growing up, that all happened to me.&quot; Even in these days of fantastic genetic hype, we have yet to locate the DNA responsible for the tales our mothers tell us, at odds with other feminine stereotypes. </p> <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/mar/07/gender.familyandrelationships">Continue reading...</a>GenderFamilyLife and styleWorld newsWed, 07 Mar 2001 16:19:25 GMThttp://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/mar/07/gender.familyandrelationshipsLynne Segal2001-03-07T16:19:25Z